GOP Rep. Shane Abbott introduced his legislation on the House floor on Feb. 17, 2026. (Photo by Mitch Perry/Florida Phoenix)
Florida’s unemployment system has long been known as among the most penurious in the nation when it comes to cash assistance. Now critics say it will become even worse under a bill (HB 191) approved Tuesday by the Florida House of Representatives.
The proposal, sponsored by Rep. Shane Abbott, R-DeFuniak Springs, says individuals receiving unemployment benefits will be disqualified if they:
- Fail to contact five prospective employers per week;
- Fail to appear on three or more occasions for a scheduled job interview without notifying the prospective employer of the need to cancel or reschedule;
- Fail to return to work when recalled by their former employer after a temporary layoff.
Abbott told the House that his motivation was his own experience as a business owner three or four years earlier, when “we had folks who would ghost on interviews or not show up even after we offered them a job.”
The state now offers 12 weeks of unemployment with an average weekly payment of $236. Most states offer between 20 and 26 weeks of benefits.
Regarding the provision that could boot an applicant off of the unemployment rolls if they decline to return to a job after a temporary layoff, Democratic Rep. Angie Nixon of Jacksonville offered this scenario:
A person who had been making $70,000 before a layoff but then was asked to return to the employer to earn $7.50 an hour (a bill pending in the Legislature says employers could under certain circumstance pay a sub-minimum wage). Would that worker be forced to work for that company despite the massive reduction in salary?
“If that is determined to be suitable work, then they would be turned down” for benefits, Abbott said.
Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, argued Floridians already face challenges trying to qualify for the unemployment benefits they are entitled to, and that this bill would make that even harder. She specifically alluded to the situation during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when the state’s unemployment system experienced a massive breakdown, leaving hundreds of thousands of people who’d lost work unable to collect benefits.
“I hate to break it to you, but those delays have not gone away,” she said. “In fact, I asked my team if they could pull for me just some data on the unemployment case load that we’ve had, and last year we saw nearly 200 different unemployment cases come to our office.
“What we need is to fix this system, not to make it harder to access under the guise of fraud,” she added.
Abbott issued a figure regarding alleged fraud taking place in the unemployment system that Democrats questioned.
“Since January of 2019, we have stopped $33 billion dollars — billion with a ‘B’ — in fraud in the state of Florida,” Abbott said.
In an earlier committee meeting in the Senate, Republican bill sponsor Stan McClain said the Department of Commerce had ferreted out some $32 billion in fraud attempts in the state’s unemployment system.
When challenged about that statistic by Democratic Sen. Tina Polsky of Boca Raton last month, McClain acknowledged, “It has not personally been verified to me by the department.”
“No report exists,” declared Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith, D-Orlando, in that same meeting. “I asked for the report as it was presented to us in the last committee. No reports exists. It is a talking point.”
That Senate bill (SB 216) has been approved by all three of its assigned committees, and is now slated to go before the full Senate for a vote.